The Nuke That Couldn’t Nuke

Let’s talk about Colonel Dimitri “The Dildo” Volkov. No, that wasn’t his real nickname, but history is written by the winners, and I’m writing this, so… “The Dildo” it is. By 1993, the Soviet Union had collapsed and, with it, Dimitri’s entire reason for being. Gone were the days of honey traps in Vienna, dead drops in Helsinki, and forcibly seducing the wives of West German attachés for state secrets and a bit of slap-and-tickle. Post-Soviet Russia was a real cockblock. All our man Dimitri had left was a rapidly expanding gut, a profound sense of ideological blue balls, and a burning resentment for a world that no longer gave a shit about his ability to kill a man with a copy of *Das Kapital*.

Then he found it—a ghost, a legend, a relic of a more erect era of geopolitics. Buried in the ass-end of a forgotten bunker in Belarus, behind a crate of what turned out to be profoundly disappointing preserved cabbage, was a “RA-115” tactical nuclear device. A ‘suitcase nuke,’ if your suitcase was the size of a goddamn washing machine and weighed more than a drunken bear. Dimitri’s shriveled little heart swelled with purpose. He was going to remind the world what it felt like to be truly, apocalyptically *fucked*. His target? The Miss World pageant. Seriously. His plan had all the strategic depth of a boner in a board meeting—he just figured if he was going to end civilization, he might as well do it while looking at some top-shelf T&A.

Dimitri, bless his cotton socks, managed to haul this two-hundred-pound harbinger of doom all the way to Sun City, South Africa, probably by bribing a series of increasingly confused cargo pilots with state-secrets-for-idiots and bottles of potato-based liquor. He sets up in a hotel overlooking the resort, wires the whole terrifying contraption, and gets ready to push the button. He’s probably got his little “Dimitri” out, ready for one last salute. He’s picturing the mushroom cloud, the screaming, the history books—*Volkov’s Climax*, they’d call it! He presses the detonator with a triumphant, vodka-fueled roar.

And… *fizz*. A single, sad little spark shot out of the control panel, followed by a smell like burnt toast and failure. A tiny red light blinked on the console, displaying a single, brutally Russian word: “ХУЙ”—basically, “DICK.” The warhead was a dud. A glorious, 20-megaton piece of shit. Decades of neglect, shoddy wiring from a tractor factory, and a leaky tritium core had rendered it about as dangerous as a particularly angry badger. And not even a radioactive one. Dimitri Volkov, would-be world-ender, was left stranded in a South African hotel room with a useless nuke, a mountain of debt, and a profoundly anticlimactic case of whiskey-dick.